08 August 2016

Fly high dress

The fabric for this dress has been in my stash for about two years. It came from a second-hand shop and probably cost me about €4. When I bought this fabric I had my boyfriend in mind, because he is crazy about airplanes. Well, perhaps crazy really does cover it, because most of his spare time he spends on flying in his Flight Simulator. But in the end I never made something and the fabric was banished to spend it's days on my parent's attic.

But then....the Dutch Airforce was going to hold it's bi-annual opendays to demonstrate their air power. Of course my boyfriend had to go! And so I went with him.

What should one wear to an airshow?

An airplanedress of course!

Tell me, am I crazy to make a dress just for this occasion? Even when the weatherprediction was horrible and I would have to wear a coat all the time? Making my dress almost invisible?

Anyway, I had fun making and wearing this dress :-)

An airplane dress isn't even that crazy, just take a look at these beautiful examples:

I went through my Burdastyle magazines to find a pattern. Found one I liked in the 2/2014 edition, Burdastyle calls it the Tea Dress.

First I googled for pattern reviews about this pattern and fortunately I found a good one here:

and lovely examples over here:

The makes of others make me understand the skirt contruction. I don't think I would've understood the Burdastyle sewing instructions without seeing this skirt picture first.

This was the result, it's so funny putting my arms through there.

It has been such a long time since I've used a Burdastyle pattern. So long I almost forgot to add seam allowance to the Burda patterns. I think I'm a bit spoiled with all the 'seam allowance included' patterns. Just lay them on the fabric and cut. So, in the end I didn't add seam allowance, but drew the patterns on the fabric. It gave me quite a zen-moment, because it made me take my time with sewing. Sometimes I just want a project done in one day and rush through the project. But I liked this slow sewing project. I made a mock-up, let my boyfriend help in the fitting and redraw my pattern pieces according to the fitting changes. All of this took me a week (work always interferes). The final garment was cut and sewn in a day.

When I put this dress on, I loved Burda again even though I couldn't remember falling out of love. The dress fit perfectly.

Just a slight zipperproblem (invisible zip not completely invisible). Patrick and Esme would surely notice such things, so I made myself fix it so it was really invisible. Somehow I keep the judges from The Great British Sewing Bee in the back of my mind, especially their comments made when judging a garment.